A lot of people commented on a recent Neatorama post Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality. Apparently, there are "food stylists" whose job is to make food look attractive for ads.
And they've got special "techniques" to do just that:
Besides choosing and arranging food, they sometimes use special effects techniques. They include:
* using tobacco smoke to give the appearance of steam
* spraying food with hairspray to hold it in place
* arranging mashed potatoes to look like ice cream
* painting cooked meat
* cereal can be photographed with white glue instead of milk, because the cereal does not get soggy quickly and the flakes stay where they are placed
* vegetables that appear to be cooked are raw and touched with a blowtorch and coated with glycerin to make them appear cooked
* ice cubes are hand-carved acrylic
* alcoholic beverage shots have water added to them to make them more transparent so the backlighting will work better
Oh, and the Dagwood-worthy sandwich pictured above? Matt Armendariz of MattBites can tell you the secret: Link
And yeah, my wife used to go on food shoots for ad work too. The stuff they did/do to make it look appealing is pretty cool, and entire science & art industry for faking it.
Pretty neat
There's also a big difference between showing food in a movie or tv scene and its representaion in advertising, where there has to be some connection to the actual product.
I was originally a film major in college and the film dept. head was world famous for his ice cream commercials. I believe he had the Knudsen contract for, like, 20 years. We watched a 2 hour making-of doc on how to photograph ice cream. Not as sweet as it sounds, but still interesting.